First female boss at Penn Mutual
"We decided to ask about the source sending us these people"
Though it hasn't been publicly announced yet, Eileen McDonnell is the new president of 173-year-old Penn Mutual Life Insurance Co., the company told workers gathered for its twice-yearly retreat at Normandy Farm yesterday.
That makes McDonnell the expected successor to Robert E. Chappell as chairman and chief executive officer of the customer-owned firm. Penn Mutual employs nearly 3,000 at its Horsham headquarters and field offices and its Janney Montgomery Scott L.L.C. brokerage and Pennsylvania Trust Co. subsidiaries. It also has 2,000 outside salespeople.
McDonnell joined Penn Mutual in 2008, three years after she ended a stint as turnaround boss of MetLife's New England Financial subsidiary to adopt a daughter.
She told me she wasn't sure at that time that she would return to the "corporate life." But when Chappell figured out McDonnell had recommended several candidates for the job to Howard Fischer Associates Inc., of Center City, which ran the presidential job search, "we decided to ask about the source sending us these people," and ended up hiring her, Chappell told me.
McDonnell is one of the few women bosses at U.S. insurance companies. (The candidates she sent Chappell were men.) Her whole extended family ended up moving to Montgomery County from New York.
Penn Mutual says its life insurance sales rose 25 percent last year as stock-wary investors bought more policies. (From my PhillyDeals column in today's print Inquirer here.)